[2][3] The ARC was founded by New Jersey businessman, author,[4][5] and art collector Fred Ross.

[8] The Art Renewal Centre offers a scholarship program, as well as an annual salon competition in order to promote classical realism.

Ross feels that there has been a "concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th century."

In 2002 he spoke to the New York Society of Portrait Artists and described the impression made on him in the Clark Art Institute by Bouguereau's 8.5-foot-tall (2.6 m) painting, Nymphs and Satyr: Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine, I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast.

With Living Masters being the highest classification given with artists receiving it such as Luis Alvarez Roure, Igor Babailov, and Virgil Elliott.